Government bans export of human skeletons

At the height of the Bengal famine in 1943, Life magazine had shocked the world by running a feature on an enterprising Calcuttan who was making a fortune by exporting human skeletons.

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Indranil Banerjie

January 21, 2014

ISSUE DATE: November 30, 1985

UPDATED: April 2, 2014 16:39 IST

At the height of the Bengal famine in 1943, Life magazine had shocked the world by running a feature on an enterprising Calcuttan who was making a fortune by exporting human skeletons. Life accused the exporter, Sanker Narayan Sen, of making skeletons from famine victims fished out of rivers or picked up from the killing fields of Bengal.

An unfazed Sen had, however, continued with his business for another 40 years, building up a world-wide distribution network and perfecting the techniques of preparing skeletons. But today, three years after retiring from the business, Sen has become one of the severest critics of this grisly trade and is being accused of heading a lobby responsible for the recent government ban on the export of human skeletons.

"I have begun to feel that it is reprehensible to sell foreigners the skeletons of our people when we cannot even feed them."

Sanker Narayan Sen,Former exporter

The Association of Exporters of Anatomical Specimens, which is currently busy persuading the Government to lift the ban, declared last fortnight that Sen had mounted an incredible plot to discredit the trade.

"Sen wants the business he pioneered to be wound up now that he is no longer in it," said Bimalendu Bhattacharjee, president of the association. The association believes that Sen succeeded in getting the Government to clamp down on exports by planting a series of damaging articles in a couple of Patna dailies in June this year.

The newspaper reports created a furore in the Lok Sabha where K.P. Pandey, MP, raised the matter. Chandrashekhar Singh and Ram Dulari Sinha denied that there was any truth in the reports, but the Government reacted by issuing an export ban order on August 16, 1985.

Meanwhile, the Patna police registered a case against one of the suppliers of human bones, charging him with "wounding religious sentiment" by removing dead bodies from burial and cremation grounds. The supplier, a Harijan of the Dom community which specialises in the skeleton trade, was acquitted due to lack of evidence. The controversy too had been fuelled by newspaper reports alleging that children were being butchered by Doms for their skeletons.

"There is nothing illegal or dubious in the manner human bones are procured," insists S.K. Mukherjee, a consultant to the association. And even though the police have been unable to unearth any irregularity in the skeleton trade, Sen maintains that the Doms are often responsible for "body snatching". This is alleged to be prevalent in Bihar because deforestation has led to steep increases in the price of wood required for cremation, so that the poor often abandon their dead or hand it over to the Doms who promise to get rid of the body.

They, in turn, bury the cadavers and exhume them after the flesh decomposes, then boil and separate the bones before shipping them to the exporters based in Calcutta.

The only legal clearance the Doms need is from the local police, who have to certify that the human skulls and skeletons have been collected from riversides and will be used for export. "It is inconceivable that thousands of skeletons with all 265 bones, some of them exceedingly delicate, can be found intact by the sides of rivers," says Sen. "The police certificates are actually obtained by paying Rs 500 to Rs 1,000 to the officer in charge of the thana," he alleges, pointing out that these certificates are normally used over and over again by the Doms.

Skulls and bones: Stock-in-trade

Sen recounts several grisly practices, including one about Doms who operate in hospitals to collect the coveted human coccyx - a set of six delicate bones at the end of the vertebral column. He adds that the Doms expertly slice out the coccyx without the owners of the cadaver suspecting anything. But even Sen discounts the horror stories about children being butchered for their bones. The issue, he says, is not criminality but ethics: "I have begun to feel that it is reprehensible to sell foreigners the skeletons of our people when we cannot even feed them."

The exporters, on the other hand, contend that such "sentimental arguments" should not be a consideration in government policy. In a memorandum submitted to Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, the association pointed out that 13 Calcutta-based exporters and their 300 employees depend on skeleton exports for their living and that they should not be penalised simply because skeleton exports might seem morally repugnant. Besides, they argue, the industry had given indirect employment to thousands of Doms who, because of their hereditary association with the dead, can find no other source of income. Skeleton importers in the US, Europe and Japan, who are wholly dependent on India - the sole skeleton exporting country in the world - are also protesting the Government's ban.

What the skeleton exporters are banking on is past experience. The Government had twice earlier banned exports, only to revoke its decision on each occasion - The first ban in 1952 lasted only a few months, and the second, during the Emergency, was lifted only after the Janata Party came to power. According to the Exporters Association, the CBI recently concluded its investigations and has submitted a report exonerating the exporters.

Sen however still feels it is time that exports were banned for good. "The business is no longer what it used to be. The exporters are undercutting each other to sell human bones to foreigners and today a skeleton fetches just about $100, compared to $180 in my time," he says. Even the Doms get only Rs 450 for every skeleton supplied in perfect condition. It is the importers who make most of the profits - in England, for instance, skeleton imports fetched Rs 1.3 crore during 1984-85. For the last 10 years, the figure has been fluctuating between Rs 1 crore and Rs 1.3 crore depending on the value of the dollar.

"I ran the business professionally, employing doctors and anatomists to scientifically classify the skeletons according to their age, disease and value. All my employees were shareholders in my company and got all benefits under the law. But today everybody is out to make a fast buck," Sen laments.

Most galling to the exporter-turned-moralist, however, is the fact that today's exporters learnt their skills from him and three years ago forced him out of the business simply by selling cheaper, employing casual labour and generally keeping overheads low. What was once a near monopoly of Sen had become just another business, though an odd one - making a living from the dead.